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July 2007

July 30, 2007

In the Richard Lester version of Superman II, Kal-El is warned against giving in to his love for Lois Lane by his mother. In the Richard Donner cut, it's his father who does the warning. Well one ambitious fan has decided to have the Man of Steel nagged by both of his parents in this scene from the "Deja Vu Cut" of Superman II.

Moonstone Books has done a tremendous job of taking Jeff Rice's Carl Kolchak, introduced in the 1970s via the TV movies The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler, as well as the weekly series Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and continued his adventures as the reporter goes up against myriad supernatural threats. Below is a Moonstone-created trailer for their Kolchak comics.

As per usual, this past weekend's Comic Con was filled with a wide variety of panels and revelations about a variety of subjects. One of the biggest, not surprisingly, was the appearance of producer/director J.J. Abrams ad his team regarding next Christmas' Star Trek prequel.

July 28, 2007

It seems that the idea of Johnny Depp playing Barnabas Collins in Dark Shadows has occurred to other people as well, as discovered by a petition started by www.petitiononline.com. That’s where the following was found:

To: Tim Burton & Johnny Depp

We, the undersigned, respectfully submit the following to Director Tim Burton and Actor Johnny Depp: Gentlemen: your films Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood & Sleepy Hollow are superb examples of Gothic, fantastic cinema. We want to see more collaborative efforts on your parts. We ask that you both consider doing a big screen adaptation of the 1960s horror themed soap opera Dark Shadows, with Mr. Burton in the director's chair, co-writing and co-producing the film with Dark Shadows creator Dan Curtis. We ask that Johnny Depp consider playing DarkShadows' central character of Barnabas Collins. We feel that such a collaboration could revive the wonderful, well loved franchise that Dark Shadows is. We feel that the unique, brilliant vision of Mr. Burton and the breathtaking acting talents of Mr. Depp could not only revive Dark Shadows, but create a new and enduring film classic in its own right, a modern Gothic masterpiece. There is a huge audience for Dark Shadows, gentlemen, and we have waited a long time for our show to return to us. We feel this may be of interest to you both as you have both been reported to be fans of Dark Shadows yourselves, and Mr. Depp has been quoted as saying that he'd like to play Barnabas Collins. We hope that you will take our request under consideration. Thank you. Sincerely,

When Warner Bros. announced that they were finally making a new Superman film, many fans were disappointed that Smallville's Tom Welling did'n't make the leap from small screen to big as the Man of Steel. One fan, however, decided to imagine what a film starring Welling as Superman would be like, resulting in this nicely-conceived trailer.

July 26, 2007

Ever since he portrayed Captain Jack Sparrow, it seems highly unlikely that anyone thinks there’s a role that Johnny Depp can’t pull off, a point he drove home while portraying Willy Wonka in Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Well now Depp is about to make claim to one of his childhood heroes, vampire Barnabas Colllins.

A lifelong fan of ABC’s 1966-71 soap opera Dark Shadows, which centered around the inadvertent resurrection of Barnabas Collins and his return to the family homestead, Collinwood, Depp has, according to Variety, just sealed a deal to portray Barnabas in a big screen version of the series. “A rights deal just closed with the estate of Dan Curtis, the producer/director who created the soap. Depp and Graham King [of GK Films] will produce with David Kennedy, who ran Dan Curtis Productions until Curtis died last year of a brain tumor.”

Barnabas was originally played by Canadian actor Jonathan Frid on the soap and in the 1970 feature film, House of Dark Shadows. In 1991 NBC resurrected the show in a one-hour prime-time version with British actor Ben Cross as the fanged one. Unfortunately the show only lasted 13 episodes, falling victim to the Gulf War and the fact that nobody was watching the show due to war coverage. In 2004 the WB shot a pilot for a proposed new series that saw Alec Newman cast in the role of Barnabas, but that show never went to series – which was particularly painful to fans of Joss Whedon’s Angel. Rumor has it that the primary reason the WB cancelled that David Boreanaz series was because the network didn’t want two vampire shows on at the same time, and since they would own the rights to Dark Shadows (Fox owns Angel), it seemed like a better deal.

What eccentric quality will Depp bring to the role of Barnabas? No one knows for sure, but since the character’s background had him chained in his coffin by his father in the mid 1790s and he was accidentally freed from that coffin by Willie Loomis in the present, one can assume that Depp will have some dramatic fun playing the character’s fish-out-of-water quality as he desperately tries to pass himself off as a cousin from England.

When Back to the Future was released on DVD, the one part of the franchise that was missing was the animated series. In the concluding part of our interview with Bob Gale, the focus is on that show, the relationship between Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd and whatever discussions there had been regarding Back to the Future Part IV.

VOICES FROM KRYPTON: The chemistry between Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd was just amazing to watch. BOB GALE: What’s particularly wonderful about it is that these guys come from completely opposite schools of acting. Christopher Lloyd is a theatrically trained actor. Chris needed to have his lines at least three days in advance, and he needed to know that they weren’t going to change, because that’s what you do when you’re trained theatrically. He liked to memorize the whole script and know it a week before we started shooting. He had a hard time with last minute changes. Whereas Michael, who’d gotten so used to doing Family Ties, where they were changing the script every ten minutes, never learned his lines until he was about to do the shot. VOICES FROM KRYPTON: Did he improv at all?BOB GALE: Not really. Bob would always tell the actors, make the parrt yours, so he would throw little things in, he might switch some words around, or change the words to make it more the way he was comfortable saying it, but as long as he was saying the right things, it was okay. Sometimes he might change something, and we’d say, “No, you can’t change that line, you have to say that line exactly as written, because it’s important for something later on.” But there wasn’t a lot of improv, we’re not talking a Tarentino movie or a Scorsese movie here.